At this fundamentally exhausting moment in human history, we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of a race for progress, where everything, literally everything, is posed as perfectable.
The myth of endlessly optimizable production has infiltrated every part of our lives.
Now, you can listen to your podcasts on double speed for ultimate uptake, max out your sleep for ultimate restoration, biohack your mind for ultimate clarity, and relax more intensely than your peers.
In such a landscape, where nothing is ever good enough or fine as it is, the past only appears more distant.
Call me a Luddite, but this endless pursuit of progress for progress's sake has, if anything, pushed me the opposite way. Exhausted by art that promises to explain how we live right now, marketed with buzzwords and presented as the diagnosis of problems I have become too fatigued to even care about, I find myself instead retreating further into the annals of art and, in particular, into the world of classical music.
My love of classical composition has been with me always, but in the last year or so, this love has become an obsession. To my partner's mild alarm, I now cook dinner while listening to the abstract atonal textures of the composer Morton Feldman. I'll go for a run while blasting the composer Steve Reich's Radio Rewrite (the repetitive rhythms really do something special to your pacing, believe me). When asked to plug into a shared aux cord, I experience a blast of mild panic, knowing that a quick play of Feldman is likely to clear the room.
If this makes me sound insufferable, then it's because I probably am becoming so. But it also makes me feel immensely, profoundly uplifted. Listening to the composer Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony reminds me that humans have always been capable of transcending the lock box of daily life with little more technology at their side than wood, string, a baton, and their voices. It also reminds me, with stunning clarity, that Mahler wasn't so different from us after all.
There's one piece of music in particular that I can't stop listening to these days, from the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. Sibelius's career brought significant popularity as well as harsh critical reviews. Though often emphatic, his Fifth also seethes with moments of confusion and melancholy, its chords souring almost as soon as they have erupted.
There is also a moment in its third movement when Sibelius mimics the sounds of birds taking flight near his country home. Above a bed of swirling strings, a sudden peal of brass sounds out: wings uplifted, moving heavenward. It regularly brings me to tears, not just because of the music itself, but because of the image of Sibelius watching the skies, awed by the birds, and seeking to turn them into song. It reminds me that, while we might have complicated and entangled our lives, we haven't fundamentally altered them.
Some deep bedrock inside us cannot be eroded or changed. Something intangible and untouchable happens when we step outside and watch birds take flight. It is something we might call our humanity itself.